I grew up in the outskirts of a city. It’s a very pretty place—there are reservoirs and meadows
and old stone houses. Our neighbours have always been nice, and it’s a safe area; there’s a
playground and a pub which functions mostly as a restaurant and a little shop where my dad
would take us to get ice lollies in summer after school.
I didn’t live close to any of my friends as a child. Most of them lived close to my primary
school which was a drive away—I missed out on “playing out”, and walking home together,
and spontaneous sleepovers. I’m in no way saying I had some kind of miserable
childhood—I’m beyond grateful for the one my parents were able to give me—but it wasn’t
until university that I got to really experience living as part of a close-knit community for the
first time.
In Nottingham, like a lot of university cities, there are a couple of areas where the majority of
students live after their first year. I live in Lenton, I have done since 2023, and I’ve become
quite attached to watching the seasons go by, again and again, on the same roads, in the same
trees (can you tell it’s about time I graduated).
My friends and I talk about it often: how lucky we are to live so close to one another. For an
academic year half of our group lived in one house, the other 3 doors down. Out of my
window, at the back of the house, I could see over onto the next road—I’d wave at a boy I
knew when he’d make it home from a night out at 7am and I was up smoking a cigarette
because I couldn’t sleep (I know, cringe).
It’s not just the people, either—friendly faces are lovely, but often too, at university, students
live in a sort of “15-minute-city”. This is the kind of general idea of everything you may need
to live a fulfilled day-to-day life being within 15 minutes’ walking distance, and that being
something we should aim for in city- and town-planning. In Lenton, which isn’t far from
Campus, there’s a small independent cinema, there are shops, take-out places, little parks, etc.
There are also ice cream vans.
Those vans drive around with their too-loud chimes for, I kid you not, practically the whole
year. They’re a comforting earworm, though. I hear them and I think of the time when, two
Marches ago, me and a very hungover friend of mine dropped what we were doing in the
kitchen and ran out for a 99 like children who couldn’t dream of a more exciting concept. We
met lots of our neighbours that day.
I know that everyone goes on and on about community these days, but they’re right to. We’re
spoiled at university. We have relatively few responsibilities, an ideal work-life balance
(most of the time), we live with our friends, or people our age, at least, and we’re able to be
as independent as we all probably hoped we would be in our 20s.
It’s no wonder there’s such an epidemic of “post-grad blues” among people once they’ve
moved back home. With impossible rent prices, an exclusive job market, and a more general
insipid individualism which seems to be getting woven more deeply into all of us each year,
it’s like life at university has become some commitment-phobic breadcrumber teasing young
people, saying, hey, this is what your life could be like, forever. It probably won’t be, though!
Maybe I’m being pessimistic. That’s very possible and all too easy given the 21st century
political climate. Perhaps I’m just panicking about the fact that I don’t have a grad-job lined
up and the fact I’ll most likely have to go back to the outskirts of my childhood where I’ll try
my best not to regress to a 16-year-old.
I truly hope there’s an older version of me out there, saying, calm down, everything will be
fine. You’ll find that life again. We all deserve that future. And we’re definitely beyond lucky
to be living it now, if only for a little while. University is, of course, not a perfect fantasy life
with no consequences. It’s certainly not something that everybody just gets handed either.
There have been times where I’ve felt so lonely and such a stranger to myself in spite of
brilliant company that I’ve wondered whether it’s right for me at all. But then—some hours
later, or the next day, or the next month—I hear a familiar song waft up the street and the
opening and closing of front doors, and I feel comfortable again.